Backlinks - Get Highest Quality Backlinks
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. The quantity and quality of backlinks to your site is one of the factors that search engines will use in determining your ranking in the search engine results pages. Needless to say, a web page will rank better if there is a greater number of backlinks to your web page. When a search engine sees that a lot of sites are linking to your webpage, it will conclude that your page is popular and therefore is what web searchers are looking for. It can be loosely interpreted that each backlink is a vote up for your webpage. Some people make the analogy that a backlink is like "web currency" - the more the better.
Not only is the quantity of backlinks important, but the quality of the backlinks as well. What do we mean by quality? Not all backlinks are weighted the same by a search engine. Some backlinks are considered higher quality than other backlinks and therefore are more valuable to have if you want your webpage to rank highly.
How to Build Backlinks
A link from an authoritative and popular site is more valuable. For example, a link from CNN.com, NYTimes.com, or Wikipedia.org to your webpage will be considered of great value. A link from a site with a higher Google page rank is more valuable. These sites are ranked highly by search engines. The designers of search engine algorithms have forumla that give more weights to backlinks from such "authoritative" sites. They know that if these popular and well-known sites are linking to your webpage, then your webpage must be something special and is worthy of consideration.
A link from a site whose contents are similar to your webpage will be more valuable. For Example: If your webpage is about health benefits of olive oil, then a link from a health website is more valuable than a link from a pet store website (with all other factors being the same).
The location of the link is also important. If the backlink in embedded amid main text content, then that is more valuable. The backlink is less valuable when it is just in a sidebar or footer amid a bunch of random links that are not related.
The text of the link can also be a factor. Let's keep with the example to suppose that the target destination of the backlink is to your webpage about olive oils. If the link text is "olive oils", then this would be better than if the link text is "click here" or "yummy food" for example.
It is important to note that an anchor link tag in HTML has the possibility of having a "rel" attribute. If the value of that attribute is "rel=nofollow", search engine will ignore the link in its ranking algorithm, making the link worthless in terms of SEO. This value of the attribute instructs the search engine to not follow the link. Therefore when obtaining links from other webmasters, make sure they are not putting the "rel=nofollow" attribute in their links.
In short, if you want a webpage to rank well in a search engine result page, then you want a large number of high-quality backlinks from other sites to your page. The best backlinks are from high-ranking authoritative sites that are relevant to your page and with the link being within a sentence in main text content area. And the link and link text must be relevant to your web page.
Some ways to Get backlinks
- Most Importantly, You need quality content, then you need to share it with people who take an interest in your niche and link you. Just make sure that your content isn't duplicate and you will be offering both your visitors and the search engines something new and something unique.
- Get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and Yahoo. It will take time and follow-up to get listed in these top directories. DMOZ is free whereas Yahoo is paid only for Commercial Listings and free for the non commercial ones. Always browse to the deepest category of a directory and submit your listing.
- You can get quality backlinks through directory submissions. It may take a long time as it may have to be approved based on the quality of the site and its relevance.
- If you want the fastest way to build backlinks, you can use forums for posting. But spamming in forums can result in Permanent BAN. Find a relevant discussion forum and post messages on it. Forums signatures is one good way of obtaining quick back links.
- Social bookmarking sites have high PR and can generate high quality backlinks to your site.
- You can even do Link building with Profiles (Such as Google Profile, About.me) etc.
Use the "Build Domain Page" from AboutUs.com . You can create new article for your website by just pointing your browser to
http://www.Aboutus.org/mysite.com, and add your site for free.
- Write an article about your site’s topic and submit it to article sites such as EzineArticles, Goarticles.com, Articlesbase.com etc.
- You can promote your Blogs via RSS Feed directories (Technorati, Feedage, Mybloglog) etc.
- Answer related questions on Yahoo Answers, and provide your link along with it.
- Create a blog on Blogger or Wordpress (or both!) about your site's topic and link back to relevant pages of your main site.
- Find relevant blogs that’s about your topic and post comments to the blog or send a mail to the blog owner asking him to review your site.
- Getting high PR backlinks can be a quick way to boost your own PR and bring in targeted visitors, especially if the site you're buying the link from is relevant to your niche.
- Purchase advertising in appropriate forums. This can be a much more advantageous way to advertise your site, as opposed to the cost and complexity of Google Adwords.
- If you know what the main competitors are in the niche you're targeting, you can attempt to contact the webmasters. You can set up mutually beneficial advertising (reciprocal linking) schemes.
- Have you ever thought of using blogsearch, by Google? http://blogsearch.google.com . Please note that most blogs are no-followed. Nofollow blogs will not help you in Google, but will certainly give you the traffic you require from the lesser known search engines.
- Some other techniques which you can adopt for link building are;
- Classifieds ad posting
- Guest Blogging
- Press release submission
- E-book submission
- Video uploads
Backinks Checker
How to check backlinks on Google, Yahoo and Bing using commands?
For Google.com: Simply go to Google and type in "link:example.com".
Example Usage: link:seofreelancing.com
For Bing.com: Simply go to Bing and type in "inbody:example.com -site:example.com".
Example Usage: inbody:seofreelancing.com -site:seofreelancing.com
For Yahoo.com: To Check Backlinks in Yahoo, Add Site in Yahoo Site Explorer
Here are 3 good Link Popularity & Backlink Analysis Tools;
SEOQuake SEO Extention to Firefox is a great SEO tool to check various SEO Parameters of a Website.